DIGITAL MARKETING

What is Digital Marketing?

Digital marketing is a broad term that includes all marketing channels and methods you can use to promote products or services on the Internet but also on electronic devices such as TVs, mobile phones and electronic billboards.
The main difference between digital marketing and traditional marketing is that digital marketing campaigns are executed exclusively through digital channels and this gives marketers more control, tools, and data to analyze the effectiveness of a campaign.

Digital marketing channels

Digital marketing has a number of channels and these can be separated into online marketing channels and offline marketing channels.

The main difference between the two is that online marketing channels are based solely on the Internet while offline marketing channels have to do with digital devices that are not necessarily connected to the Internet.

Digital marketing is a broad term that includes all marketing channels and methods you can use to promote products or services on the internet but also electronic devices such as TVs, Mobile phones and electronic billboards.

ONLINE MARKETING CHANNEL

OFFLINE MARKETING CHANNEL

What is a Digital Marketing strategy?

A digital marketing strategy is a detailed plan on how you can utilize the different digital marketing channels to achieve your business goals. Or,

A digital marketing strategy is a plan of action that describes how to use one or more online marketing channels to reach your target audience. It has a list of steps and specific digital marketing goals.

When you design a digital marketing strategy you need to consider which channels to use, the resources (people, time and money) to assign to each channel and what to expect in terms of results.

A common mistake made by many digital marketing managers or small business owners is that they try to execute everything at once and at the end of the day they get no results.

Either because they don’t have the necessary expertise to run digital marketing campaigns or because they end up spending their budgets on channels that are not suitable for their business.

Having a digital strategy is important because it will help you orchestrate the different online marketing strategies so that they all work towards achieving your business goals.

The person responsible to design and execute a digital strategy is the digital marketing manager of a company.

Together with his team, they will make sure that every marketing activity is part of your digital marketing plan.

How to create a Digital Marketing Strategy?

These are the steps to follow to create an effective marketing strategy:

Specify measurable business goals
Identify your target audience
Understand users needs and search intent
Create a content marketing library
Start with SEO as early as possible
Explore paid advertising channels
Use email marketing segmentation and automation
Take advantage of new traffic sources
Use re targeting and personalization
Work on conversion optimization
Evaluate and revise your strategy

1. Specify measurable business goals:

The first step in creating a digital marketing strategy is to specify your business goals. In other words, to determine what you want to accomplish with digital marketing.

Any goals you set have to be measurable and well-defined. Everything in a digital marketing campaign is measurable (from start to finish) and you need to take advantage of this and form a digital marketing plan that has specific milestones and targets.

Some typical goals are:

Raise brand awareness
Increase organic traffic
Make more sales
Get more email subscribers
Reduce the cost of PPC campaigns
Get more Facebook followers
Get more YouTube subscribers

While the above is a good starting point, they are still vague. A better version would be:

Raise brand awareness by:

Increasing Facebook Followers to 10K
Facebook Ad reach to 400K
Getting brand mentions from high traffic websites
Increasing YouTube video views by 10K

Increase organic traffic by:

Getting higher rankings for keyword X
Publishing new content targeting keyword Y
Updating existing content that meets criteria A and B
Run an email outreach campaign to get X links

A good way to come up with measurable goals is to use the top-down approach. Start by specifying your goals in business terms and then translate that to digital marketing goals.

Here is an example to understand this better.

Business goal: Increase sales to $50K per month from Google organic traffic.

Assuming that you make $1000 from every 5K visits you get from Google search, to get to $50K sales per month you’ll need to get around 250,000 visits from Google.

If your current traffic level is 140K Google visits per month, then your digital marketing strategy should include steps on how you can get from 140K visits to 250K visits.

A typical step could be, “Publish 3 new blog posts per week”, which needs to be broken down further to specify which/topics keywords the blog posts will target and what would be the expected outcome in terms of traffic increase.

Experienced digital marketing specialists know that this is not always easy to calculate because digital marketing is a dynamic industry and changes all the time. But, having a detailed plan will help you adjust your strategies so as to get closer to your goals as possible.

The bottom line is that you need to have a digital marketing plan to follow and not start running campaigns on different channels without knowing what you want to achieve.

It goes without saying that your plan has to be realistic, taking into account the competition and complexities of your industry.

Also, to be able to analyze data and make informed decisions, you first need to track it correctly and accurately so, having a good analytics system in place is more than essential.

2. Identify your target audience:

The second step is to identify your target audience. In other words to specify in detail who you want to target with your campaigns.

Some marketers, place this as the first step in the process and this is not wrong. What is certain is that this is an exercise you need to perform in the early stages and before finalizing the next steps of your marketing strategy.

What does identifying your audience means? Specifying in detail the characteristics of people that might be potentially interested in your offerings.

In your audience identification, you should include things like:

The countries/areas your potential customers live in
Their age group
Gender
Educational background
Marital status
Family status
Occupation
Their interests

The exact details depend on the industry you’re in and the products/services you are trying to promote.

A good way to start crafting your buyer personas is to analyze the data you already have available.

Digg into your Google Analytics reports, Facebook audience insights, Google Ads reports, and start creating your customer profiles.

3. Understand users needs and search intent:

Once you know the profile of your target customer, the next step is to use different techniques and try to understand their needs and how they express this when searching for information using a search engine or a social network.

There are two ways to approach this process. The first method is to take the typical digital sales funnel and identify what your customers might need at each stage.

The second method is to take the different customer profiles created above, and come up with a separate sales funnel for each.

This is my recommended method because it makes it easier to set up and run dedicated digital marketing campaigns for each customer profile.

Let me give you an example to understand this better.

My agency provides digital marketing services to small businesses and we’re also offering online courses. People looking for services have a totally different profile than people looking for training.

There are also variations within the same segment i.e. beginners to digital marketing have different training needs than the more experienced marketers.

So, by analyzing each buyer persona separately, you can come up with a more accurate plan of how your content, products, or services can help them solve their problems and needs.

Search Intent

In the digital marketing world, the needs of users are expressed through search queries. When a user types a search query in Google, it has a specific intent and if your content/products or services do not satisfy it, your digital marketing strategy will fail.

That’s why it is important to perform keyword research from the very beginning and capture all topics, keywords, and phrases throughout the buyer journey, from awareness to conversion.

Social media networks don’t reveal the ‘searchers intent’, what happens then?

It’s true that users browsing Facebook may not have a specific intent in mind but they have a particular profile.

To increase your chances of targeting the right type of audience, you can analyze the profile of your search visitors (using Google Analytics) and using custom audiences to find matching audiences (Lookalike Audiences) on Facebook.

Always use any available data that you have as your starting point for research. The results will be more accurate than using data that is external to your website.

4. Create a content marketing library:

The next strategic step you need to make is to create a library of content assets. You know your audience and their needs, now it’s time to create various types of assets to use in your campaigns.

A digital asset can be a blog post, infographic, image, video, podcast, cover image, logo, and anything else you can publish on your website or social networks.

In the digital marketing world, this is what content marketing is all about. Content marketing is important because it’s the process used to decide what kind of content to create, when, and where to publish it.

I prefer to execute this step in the beginning and before running any campaigns because it’s more efficient to have a pool of content assets ready in advance rather than having to do this every time you’re about to start a campaign.

When you follow the steps in the order described in this guide (set goals, create customer personas, identify needs, and search intent), then you have all the information you need to work on your content assets.

It’s also easier to assign the content creation part to the different members of your team to work in parallel.

5. Start with SEO as early as possible:

A strategic decision to make that can positively impact your digital marketing efforts is to start with SEO as early as possible.

SEO is one of the most effective digital marketing strategies but it has a caveat. It takes time to work.

Unlike other digital marketing strategies, when you start an SEO campaign, it may take 4 to 6 months to generate any results. This is a long time to wait so most marketers tend to focus on other digital channels first (like Facebook Ads, Google Ads) that are more immediate.

That’s a good approach but the common mistake is that they forget about SEO and only re-visit SEO after they realize that they cannot build a successful digital marketing campaign based solely on paid advertising.

So, a better strategy is to allocate a portion of your marketing budget from the very beginning on SEO related tasks. In parallel, you can start working on your paid campaigns and other channels.

This way, you’ll reach a point sooner where most of your traffic and sales will come from SEO and rely less on paid ads.

In business terms, this means an increase in revenue and profit and this is exactly the goal of a successful digital marketing strategy.

How to get started with SEO?

SEO is a huge topic. Search engines take hundreds of parameters into account before they decide which webpages to show in the results for a particular query.

To make it easier to handle, SEO can be broken down into three main sub-processes: Technical SEO, On-Page SEO, and Off-Page SEO.

Each process is responsible to optimize your website for a number of parameters that will eventually lead to higher rankings and traffic.

SEO is important because the majority of search traffic is distributed to websites that appear in the first 5 positions of the search results. So, if you want to get traffic from search engines, you need to appear in the top positions for search terms related to your business.

The best way to get started with SEO is to follow a step-by-step approach:

Step 1: Review your technical SEO and make sure that search engines can access and index your content without any problems. This is important since any issues at this stage will be catastrophic for your efforts.

Step 2: Optimize your content for search engines. In Step 4 above, you will create content that satisfies the needs of the user. Before publishing, you need to make sure that it’s SEO optimized.

This means, giving the right signals to search engines (through your titles, descriptions, headings, etc) to help them understand your content better.

Step 3: Promote your website and content. One of the most important SEO ranking factors is how other websites on the Internet ‘think’ of your website. If other relevant websites trust your website and they express this through a backlink, this is a strong signal to Google that your website deserves to be on the top positions.

If SEO is something that you haven’t done before for your website, the best way to approach this is to add it to your digital strategy and assign this task to SEO experts.

You can also use the resources below to learn more.

Resources to Learn More about SEO

SEO Checklist – The most comprehensive SEO checklist you can find online. Follow the checklist to fully optimize your website for search engines.
SEO Course – The only SEO Course you’ll ever need to read to learn SEO.

6. Explore paid advertising channels:

When you start an online business, you know in advance that a large portion of your marketing budget will be allocated on PPC marketing (paid ads).

But, not all PPC platforms are the same. Based on your previous analysis (steps 2 and 3 above), you need to choose which platforms are more suited for your audience.

You can use the table below to get an idea of how the user profile looks for the most popular social networks.

For example, if you have an eCommerce website selling directly to consumers (B2C) then Facebook is probably a good choice. If on the other hand, you are targeting Business executives, then LinkedIn is more appropriate.

Run Pilot Campaigns First

The best way to find out which platforms to incorporate in your digital marketing strategy plan is to run pilot campaigns.

A pilot campaign will not waste your budget and at the same time, it will give you enough data to make an informed decision.

A common mistake made by digital marketers is to blindly allocate all their budget on one channel because it’s the trend without testing or considering all of the available channels they can use.

Here is a list of the most popular advertising platforms you can use to reach your target audience:

Facebook Ads – ideal for all kinds of businesses. Works better for B2C. The best platform to raise brand awareness.

Instagram Ads – suitable if you want to reach a younger audience.

Twitter Ads – Business oriented. Great for informing your community of updates.

Linked Ads – Strictly for business-related advertising. Use it to reach decision-makers.

Google Ads – The most reliable platform to get targeted traffic to your website through paid search ads.

Google Display Ads – Use it for re targeting purposes and to reach your audience in the various Google products (YouTube, Gmail) and thousands of websites that participate in Google AdSense.

Bing Ads – Not as powerful as Google but a good alternative to get more search traffic to your website.

7. Use email marketing segmentation and automation:

The end goal of a digital marketing campaign is to generate more revenue for a business. But in order to get to your ultimate goal, you first need to consider micro-conversions.

Micro-conversions are actions taken by users that are part of the funnel that leads to sales.

For example, while one of my goals is to sell my digital marketing course, an intermediate goal is to get people to subscribe to my email list (micro conversion).

I consider this an important step because I know from my statistics that a large percentage of people that subscribe to my list, will eventually convert.

The same concept can be applied to any business or product. You need to give incentives to users to sign up for your email list and then send them personalized emails that will help them make the final decision, which is to convert by buying your products or services.

An important element to make this work is segmentation and automation.

With email segmentation, you segment your list into groups of people that share the same interests and send them customized content.

For example, people registering to my list to download the SEO Checklist will get different email content than people who register to receive my posts updates.

If email marketing is a new concept for you, then you can realize that it involves a lot of work and that’s where email automation comes into play.

Here is a visual example of how email automation works.

With email automation, you can orchestrate the whole process to run without intervention and manual work. Your job is to set up the automation campaigns, monitor their performance, and take corrective actions.

In addition to micro-conversions, email marketing is a great way to raise brand awareness and build a community around your brand. This is something that can positively influence the performance of all your digital marketing campaigns.

8. Take advantage of new traffic sources:

A complete digital marketing strategy should not only take into account the traditional online marketing channels but should also cater to new digital marketing strategies that rise to the surface.

To be more precise, at the time of writing this post, there are a number of new channels that you can explore like:

Google Discover Ads
Google Shopping Search
Google Shopping Ads
Tik-Tok
Google Keen
Optimizing your content for voice search
Optimizing your content for Google rich snippets

These channels are new and most probably less competitive than established channels. This means you can get better results at a lower cost.

Will these help your strategy? The only way to find out is to test them by running pilot campaigns (as explained above).

9. Use re targeting and personalization:

So far, all of the above strategies are related to how you can reach more people but it’s equally important to follow-up on users that already know your brand, but are not yet customers.

This is known as ‘retargeting’ or ‘remarketing’. With retargeting, you can show specific ads to users that visited your website (or social network page) but did not convert.

It’s a very powerful technique that has higher conversion rates and less CPA (cost per action) than other marketing techniques.

The ‘marketing rule of 7’ (established in the 1930s by marketers), states that prospects are more likely to convert if they see or hear an ad, at least 7 times.

Unsurprisingly, it is a rule that is applicable today, and remarketing is the way to implement this.

The most popular platforms to run remarketing campaigns are Facebook and Google Display Network.

The concept is simple. You connect your website with Facebook and Google by adding a piece of code provided by the platforms.

You then create custom audience lists that include the people who visited your website but did not convert.

You then create campaigns and ads that are shown to these users as they browse Facebook or visit other websites on the Internet.

To make remarketing more effective, you can also add the element of personalization. Instead of treating all visitors as one group, you can add rules to show different ads to people based on the actions they took on your website.

For example, you can create a retargeting campaign for people that added an item to their shopping cart but did not checkout. To give them an incentive to come back and finish the process, you can offer them a discount via coupon code.

As a matter of fact, retargeting should be a strategy to include in your digital marketing plan from the early stages. This way you’ll maximize the return for any money spend on paid ads or SEO.

10. Work on conversion optimization:

Another area that needs to be part of your overall marketing strategy is conversion optimization.

I can tell you from experience, that 90% of digital marketing campaigns focus on how to get traffic and forget about conversion optimization.

What is conversion optimization? In simple terms, conversion optimization is the process to follow to optimize your website so that a higher percentage of your visitors will perform the desired actions.

This starts with your website design, content, landing page optimization, email signups forms, shopping cart, checkout process, and other elements that contribute (directly or indirectly) to conversions.

One of the techniques to use is A/B testing. By applying a/b testing principles you can measure the effect on conversions by carefully changing parts of your website or sales funnel.

I’ll not go into the details on how to perform A/B testing or conversion optimization (you can follow the links in the resources below to learn more), but from a strategic point of view, it’s important to add conversion optimization activities in your digital marketing plan.

Here is an example of how a conversion optimization plan looks like:

You can add it as a step to be executed as part of a single campaign or as part of your general strategy review process.

What I advise my team to do is to review conversion optimization after a campaign is considered to be optimized in terms of traffic.

In other words, it’s better to try and optimize your campaign to get as many visits as possible with the lower cost and then start testing different landing pages, messages to see which one performs better in terms of conversions.

As a rule of thumb, when doing A/B testing, you should focus on specific changes so that you can accurately measure their effect on conversions.

11. Evaluate and revise your strategy:

Digital marketing is a highly dynamic industry. ‘Rules’ change all the time and it’s extremely important that you evaluate and revise your digital marketing strategy to stay current and relevant.

The best way to evaluate your campaign is to do it based on KPIs and other metrics. The most important metrics for any kind of digital marketing campaign are:

Number of website visits
Cost per visit
Cost per conversion
Click-Through Rate
Number of Conversions
Number of micro-conversions
Time on site
Bounce rate
Number of social shares
Number of comments

If you have a good analytics system in place and can track these for every campaign that is part of your strategy, then it will be easier to make informed decisions.

Don’t forget that part of your evaluation should be to look for new channels you can add to your strategy.

It’s always a good idea to take a look at your competitor’s strategies and identify which of their strategies you can include to your marketing mix.

Example of a Digital Marketing Strategy:

Although each and every digital marketing strategy is unique and based on the specific needs and goals of a business, you can read below an example to help you understand how all marketing channels can work towards a common goal.

Example: Digital Marketing Strategy for a company selling digital products (online courses, eBooks, etc.).

Step 1: Website – The first step is to create a website that is fast and mobile-friendly. The website should have several landing pages (or sales pages) to present the company and its products.

Step 2: SEO – The next step is to perform an SEO Audit and identify which areas need to be optimized for SEO. Technical SEO should be tackled first, then On-Page SEO and last Off-Page SEO.

Step 3: Content Marketing – Based on the results of thorough keyword research and findings of the SEO Audit, you should create a content marketing plan that will include:

What kind of content to create for the website (text and videos)
When to publish it (publishing calendar)
How to promote it (can include social media channels, email, and PPC campaigns).

Step 4: Social Media Marketing – Utilize all social media marketing campaigns to promote brand awareness and sales. Identify which social media channels are suitable for marketing your business (based on customer profiling) and create a schedule for publishing content on those networks.

At the same time, start creating lists of influencers and other people that are most likely to be interested in your products or share your content on social media.

Step 5: Email Marketing – Start building an email list using several CTA areas on your website and social media channels.

Your initial goal is to get people to sign up for your newsletter or register to download free material or register for free trials.

Create several email marketing funnels to get ‘push’ your subscribers from the awareness stage to the conversion stage.

Step 6: Pay-Per-Click Advertising – In parallel to the above activities set up an AdWords Campaign to target people searching for product-related keywords on Google and remarketing campaigns on Facebook to go after users that visited your website but did not convert.

Step 7: Video Marketing – Part of step 3 above is to identify which topics/keywords you can create video content. Publish your videos on a dedicated YouTube channel, on Facebook, Instagram and any other platforms you are targeting in your campaigns.

For each video create a blog post on your website and embed the video with text content.

Step 8: Mobile Marketing – Consider creating a mobile app that users can download from the App Stores that will include your latest news and ways for people to access your courses through your app.

Step 9: Measure and Analyze the results – Ensure that you have Google analytics installed and configured correctly and that you can accurately measure the effectiveness of the above campaigns.

Create an excel sheet and add for each campaign details about the cost, number of visits, number of conversions, people reached, etc.

The above it’s just a summary of what your digital marketing strategy should include. If you are a small business with limited resources then it’s normal that you won’t be able to execute the whole plan from the very beginning.

What you should do is to follow a step-by-step approach starting with your website, SEO and content marketing.

Once you manage to have these in place for a number of months, you will gradually experience an increase in traffic and revenue and then you can add the other tools to the mix.

What is the role of a digital marketing manager?

The role of a digital marketing manager is to create a well-defined digital marketing strategy. It’s his job to decide which channels to use, where to allocate the budget and in what order.

The DMM has also the role to oversee the work of the other managers and make sure that everybody is working towards the same goals.

A typical ‘digital marketing team’ has the following roles:

Digital Marketing Manager

A person with skills and good knowledge related to:

SEO
Social Media
Content marketing
PPC advertising

SEO Experts are not digital marketing managers. A digital marketing manager has a broad understanding of ALL digital marketing channels and not just SEO.

Most successful digital marketing managers are experienced SEO’s who have working experience with other marketing channels as well.

Content marketing manager

A content marketing manager is responsible to create and execute the content marketing plan. He is the person to decide what type of content to create and what channels to utilize.

Social media manager

He is responsible for the promotion of a company through various social channels. He works closely with the content marketing manager to push the right content to the right people at the right time.

SEO manager

Depending on the team structure, you may decide to have a dedicated SEO manager that can assist the Digital Marketing for SEO related tasks.

PPC manager

A PPC manager is responsible for running paid campaigns on different platforms, mainly Google Ads, Facebook Ads (including Instagram) and Bing.

PPC managers can become certified in Google Ads or Facebook, which another way to prove their qualifications.

Email marketing manager

The job of an email marketing manager is to ensure that any email leads created through all the other channels are entered into suitable email funnels that will eventually lead to conversions.

Sending a newsletter every now and then is not email marketing. A proper email marketing campaign turns leads into customers and this is the reason you need to have a dedicated manager to monitor these activities.

Digital marketing misconceptions:

The term ‘digital marketing’ is relatively new and that’s why it has become common for people to use it even in cases where they mean something different.

The most common misconceptions are:

Digital Marketing VS Internet Marketing

Internet marketing is a subset of digital marketing and is not the same thing.

Internet marketing or online marketing refers to the methods you can use to run campaigns on the Internet.

As shown in the diagram above, the main components of Internet marketing are: Search Engine Marketing (which includes SEO and PPC), Social media marketing, content marketing, email marketing, affiliate marketing. Mobile marketing and video marketing.

Digital marketing is over and above online / Internet marketing as it includes other digital channels as well.

Digital marketing VS Social media marketing

When you have an active presence in social media, you are essentially running social media marketing campaigns and not digital marketing campaigns.

Social media marketing is just one of the components of digital marketing. To fully experience the benefits of digital marketing, you need to add more digital channels to your plan.

Digital marketing is all about marketing on the internet and other electronic devices. It’s not a single process but it consists of a number of sub-components that you can use depending on what you want to achieve.

Not all methods work for all businesses, that’s why it’s important to come up with a digital marketing strategy that will detail how you will utilize each process.

A digital marketing manager is a person responsible to monitor all digital marketing activities.

He needs to have a broad knowledge of how the internet works so that can decide which marketing activities are more suitable for a given project.

Other typical members of a digital marketing team are content manager, SEO manager, social media manager, email marketing manager and PPC manager.

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